49 Quotes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we’ve lost.

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

Outside the hospital,” said Benavides with a hint of impatience, “I do not speak of my terminal patients. It’s a decision I made many years ago and it still seems the best decision I ever made. One has to keep one’s lives separate, Vasquez. If not, one can go crazy. This is exhausting, it sucks one’s energy. And like any other person, I have limited energy.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.

Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.

Do you dream of your victims?” he asked.“Yes,” the murderer told him. “But only when I’m awake.” Anzola had never heard a more perfect definition of guilt, and didn’t ask him anything else on the subject.

Childhood doesn’t exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.

Looking at him, nobody would ever have imagined that inside his briefcase were the bones of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Sometimes I went with him, a boy hand in hand with his father, and my father would then have a living boy in one hand and a briefcase of dead bones in the other. Bones, furthermore, for which anyone would have killed right there.